Chapter 13 - Since When Do Potato Gods Have Eyes?

[Requirements have been met.]

[You have unlocked the ‘Path’ skill {Xera Transfer}.]

[You have completed the quest {Save The Horses!}.]

[Distributing quest rewards…]

[You have ranked up! Your title has been changed to {Just A Spud}.]

[You have unlocked the ‘Path’ skill {Potato God’s Eye}.]

[Your body has taken significant damage.]

[Searching for a suitable host to transfer consciousness.]

[Search complete. Results: None.]

[There are no suitable hosts for your consciousness. Would you like to begin the backup sequence? If no answer is given within five seconds, the backup sequence will automatically begin.]

[Five.]

[Four.]

[Three.]

[Two.]

[One.]

[Commencing backup sequence.]

[Hidden race ability {Potato Regeneration} has been activated.]

[Due to significant damage to your body, using the skill {Potato Regeneration} may incur side effects. Would you like to continue? If no answer is given within five seconds, {Potato Regeneration} will not deactivate.]

[Five.]

[Four.]

[Three.]

[Two.]

[One.]

[Side effect: You will be put into a dormant state until your body has been regenerated.]

[Inducing artificial sleep…]

I woke to the methodical clopping of horses on hard terrain. And darkness. I’d been in this kind of position so many times by now that the thought that I was dead didn’t even cross my mind. Now the question was; ‘Where am I? What happened?’

Looking around, I realised I was back in Winter’s saddle bag.

Where were the boars? What had happened to them? The last thing I remembered was the boar’s mouth opening up and its drool slowly dripping onto me...

Urgh. I shivered. I never wanted to see the inside of a boar’s mouth- no, anyone’s mouth- ever again.

Having recalled everything up to this point, I directed my attention to the text in front of me. There was a lot. So much that I ended up taking a solid few minutes to read through them all. I was a slow reader, after all.

From the text, I could deduce that I had indeed completed the path quest and ranked up- though how I’d done it was beyond me. Before I left the safety of the saddle bag, I wanted to find out more about these new skills and abilities I had mysteriously acquired.

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Xera Transfer

Lvl: 1/10

Category: Path

Type: Active

Xera Cost: Interchangeable

Enables the user to transfer xera in limited amounts to other people or beings. Xera can only be transferred from the user of the skill to a recipient. To transfer xera, you must either be touching or within a three centimetre radius of the recipient.

This skill is compatible with {Germinate} and {Super Weak Telekinesis}.

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Potato God’s Eye

Lvl: 1 (Maxed)

Category: Path

Type: Passive

Buffs: Increased Area Of Awareness

A path specific skill that utilizes A.S.S to reveal a portion of a Gifted’s profile. Profile information will be shown in comparison to the user’s own statistics. Can be used as a power gauge. This skill also works on your Gifted.

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Potato Regeneration

Type: Ability

Naturally reforms your body if it gets damaged in any way. The more damaged your body is, the longer the regeneration will take. If the damage is critical and your body cannot hold itself together, you will lose consciousness as to not have a stroke from the shock of your insides falling out.

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Three new skills in one go? That was… surprising. With the information of these three skills, I had partly formed an idea of the sequence of events that’d happened.

Just before I blacked out, I remembered hearing the sound of an explosion. I expected that sound originated from my e-potatoes, which I’d somehow blown up with ‘Xera Transfer’.

I chuckled.

My plan had been so stupid.

Why blow yourself up, when you can blow up your children?

Anyways, once the e-potatoes exploded, I would’ve been ‘damaged’ in the explosion, causing myself to black out and ‘Potato Regeneration’ to kick in. Somehow, the others must have found me and brought me along with them.

With this thought in mind, I pushed open the flap of the saddle bag and floated out cautiously.

I was correct.

The saddle bag I was in belonged to Winter, who was now sitting at the front of the horse, Verity’s hands wrapped around her waist. Neither of them had noticed me yet, since they were too focused on the path ahead.

The ‘path ahead’ was the rocky face of a steep cliff. The horse had to pick its footing carefully in order not to slip on the loose cobblestones.

Now that I noticed it, the sky was dark, a sign of an incoming storm. The landscape was bleak, not much to see apart from grey stones and the jagged outlines of more cliffs. Just how long had it been since I fell into a coma? How far did we have to travel for the surroundings to change so drastically?

‘Uh…’ I began, only to realize I didn’t know what to say. ‘Hi?’ I tried, addressing both Winter and Verity at once. Every few level ups of the ‘mind speech’ skill allowed me to speak to another person at the same time.

The two snapped their heads so fast towards me that I almost lost concentration and dropped to the ground.

“June? Is that you? Is that really you?” Winter grabbed me and looked at me incredulously.

‘Uh, yea. I’m back?’ I didn’t know how they’d react. Would they be happy to see me? Sad? Also, I noticed a wall of text next to each of their heads, but decided to look into it later.

“Oh, June. Thank goodness you’re still alive.” Winter sighed in relief.

‘Ha.’ I thought smugly. Maybe these guys weren’t as unfriendly as I originally thought they were. Unfortunately, I had more important things to ask about other than; ‘You missed me, didn’t you?’

‘What happened? How long has it been since I went into a coma? Where are we?’

Winter chuckled. “Slow down, slow down, one question at a time.”

“To answer your question about what happened,” Verity interrupted. “We found your smoking husk inside a boar’s mouth after the explosion. The boars were all dead. Somehow, you killed them.”

I nodded. My theory had been proven slightly correct. I’d need to test this later when I found the time. ‘How did you know it was me, though? I don’t think I look any different from my e-potatoes. At least, I shouldn’t.’

Verity groaned. “Yeah. We didn’t. But since the others were unrecognizable smoking ashes, you were the only one that was left. We just prayed it was you. Seeing as you were quite damaged, Kearan had a hunch that you weren’t responding because you were injured.”

I couldn’t help it. This whole situation was just too heartwarming for me. ‘I guess you guys really missed me, huh.’

“What? Nah, that wasn’t the reason why we held off from eating you. You’re one of our only sources of food, remember? Speaking of that, can you start producing now? We haven’t eaten your delicious potato babies for a whole week now.”

Just a food source? They only thought of me as a food source?

I- I didn’t know what to say. This wasn’t right. I was a human too! Or at least I was. Before that stupid God did this. It wasn’t even like I’d asked to be turned into a potato!

Before I could raise my complaints, I caught a glimpse of something that made me do a double-take. It was the number ‘ten’ on the wall of text next to her head. But the number wasn’t what made me hesitate. It was what it was next to.

The words ‘Applied Faith’.

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Winter Hina

Level: 34

Type: Gifted

Class: Swordswoman

Path: N/A

Applied Faith: 10

Combat Power: 7232%

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Faith. But how could she have such a statistic? I’d thought that only I was able to earn it from other people. Unless…

I quickly opened up my own profile.

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Winston June

Title: Just A Spud

Race: Potato

Path: Path to Potato Godhood

Faith: 51

Xera: 100/100

Path Skills:

[Divine Being] (Passive) {Maxed} [Xera Transfer] (Active) {1/10} [Potato God’s Eye] (Passive) {Maxed}

Race Skills:

[Germinate] (Active) {3/30} [Potato Battery] (Passive) {2/40}

Misc. Skills:

[Mind Speech] (Active) {5/20} [Super Weak Telekinesis] (Active) {4/5} [Area Of Awareness] (Passive) {7/25}

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Woah! Apart from the new skills which were a nice addition to my growing collection, I was right. I now had faith. Fifty one of ‘it’, to be exact.

But what did it do? I couldn’t see any visible changes on the profile screen, nor did I feel any physical ones. I called out the skill information for ‘Divine Being’ on a hunch.

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Divine Being

Lvl: 1 (Maxed)

Category: Class

Type: Passive

Faith Buffs (General): -5.1% time needed to level up skills, +5.1% strength for active skills, 5% xera reduction on active skills, assortment of special benefits to skills

Faith needed to rank up: 200

Faith needed to generate path quest: 100

Enables the L’Der to gain {Faith}. {Faith} is a unit that determines when path progression quests can be generated. {Faith} will also enable the L’Der to rank up, which may lead to unlocking new skills. The L’Der with {Divine Being} gains {Faith} whenever a Gifted places their trust in them. As trust grows, the amount of {Faith} the individual contributes increases. {Faith} will allow the L’Der to grow stronger. {Faith} can be lost.

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Bingo! I was right yet again. All the information could be found in the skill page.

As I skimmed it over, I realised one important thing. This ‘faith’ thing was no joke. Firstly, it gave me some massive buffs- although not so massive yet. The buffs were definitely useful, but weren’t as substantial as I thought they would be. With only five percent of each section, I doubted they would help much as of now.

Thankfully, that wasn’t too much of a letdown as I would definitely gain more in the future- especially since I now knew how. I think.

Besides that, there was the option to actually rank up just from collecting faith. Now that was the most overwhelming part. It’d taken a whole week- not to mention a dangerous situation- for my second path quest to generate. With this, all I would need to do was to earn some faith and bam! Easy path quests and rank ups!

‘Hooh.’ I exhaled and calmed myself down. Phew, I was really getting excited there.

Now came the question. If I had fifty-one faith, and I’d received ten from Winter, where did the others come from? Oh, yeah. One more. Why? Why now? Was it because I helped defend the horses?

I glanced back at Winter’s profile again, this time looking at it more in depth.

I smiled a little at Winter’s last name, Hina. It was pretty. Just like she was. But as I got further, one specific statistic wiped the smile straight off my non-existent face. The dull black percentage next to ‘combat power.’

7232%.

7232%.

7232%.

Seventy two times larger than my own combat power.

‘Oh, you’ve got to fucking kidding me!’ I screamed out loud. ‘God! You little shit! Just when I was actually beginning to feel content with my current life!’

“June?” Verity asked, looking a little concerned. “What’s wrong?”

I sighed and forced myself to calm down. “Nothing, I-”

As I turned around, I got a glimpse of Verity’s profile.

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Verity Glade

Level: 41

Type: Gifted

Class: Ranger

Path: N/A

Applied Faith: 4

Combat Power: 9417%

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Combat Power: 9417%

“FUUUCCCKKKK!”